Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950

by Mark Mazower

  SURVIVORS

  THE GERMANS finally pulled out at the end of October 1944, more than two weeks after the liberation of Athens. The previous month eight Jews had been discovered in hiding and shot. Another five or six survived until liberation. Several hundred, who had escaped into the mountains, or gone to fight with the partisans, now made their way back. Hundreds more had survived in hiding in or around Athens and many of these also gradually returned. But first-hand news of the fate of the tens of thousands who had been deported to Poland did not come until March 1945 with the appearance of the first survivors from Auschwitz.9

  The first to arrive was an Athenian Jew called Leon Batis who reached Salonica from the north on 15 March. That evening, tired, irritated and suspicious, eager to get on to Athens to see whether his family was still alive, he told his story over ouzo to a large audience in a café. Journalists demanded the facts, the Jews who had come wanted to know about their relatives and friends. “This was the first time we heard those terms: gas chambers, selections. We froze and dared not ask for details,” wrote one of the listeners. “Batis spoke coldly, without regard for our emotions … He thought everyone knew [these things].” The next day, his account was in most of the city’s newspapers. It was a precise and largely accurate description of the fate of the community. “They burned all the Jews from Thessaloniki in the crematorium,” was one headline. A few weeks later others brought further details, including for the first time reports of the sterilization and other medical experiments performed on many women. By August, two hundred had returned and more were on the way. One year after liberation, there were just over one thousand “Poles”—as the others called them—who had come back from the camps.10

  The survivors found Salonica transformed and unrecognizable. Yehuda Perahia, a tobacco merchant who had gone through the war in hiding, recorded his feelings in verse:

  How into rusty iron pure gold has been transmuted!

  How what was ours has been changed into a foreign symbol! …

  I walk through the streets of this blessed city.

  Despite the sun, it seems to stand in darkness.11

  Jewish tombstones were to be found in urinals and driveways, and had been used to make up the dance-floor of a taverna built over a corner of the former cemetery itself. Because graves had been ransacked for the treasure that had been supposedly hidden there, “many Jewish skulls and bones are visible.” The Hirsch quarter was demolished except for the synagogue and lunatic asylum which were being used as warehouses. Other synagogues had been dynamited by the Germans, and lay in ruins. Trying to cope with an acute housing shortage—there were sixty thousand refugees from eastern Macedonia in the city in mid-1945—the over-stretched local authorities did not provide any special assistance to Jewish returnees. Without homes, for the most part, or work, the survivors faced destitution. Relief workers reported an urgent need for clothing, mattresses and blankets. Many were sleeping on benches or on the floor in the remaining few synagogues.12

  The overwhelming short-term priority—as throughout Greece at this time—was for food, shelter and medical assistance. The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) was active in the city helping Jews and Christians alike and one of its officials, Bella Mazur, who had been seconded from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (better known simply as the “Joint”) spent her spare time “trying to help organize the community so that it can have the semblance of a formal and official set-up.” Like many in the city, Jewish survivors were dependent on UNRRA for food and clothing. Mazur gave each former concentration camp inmate, most of whom lacked anything other than the clothes they had returned in, underclothes and double blankets which served as mattresses. Some received old pairs of shoes. Several communal buildings were cleaned up, renovated and whitewashed—refugees from the Bulgarian zone had squatted in them during the war—to house the most needy occupants.13

  There was no disguising the disappointment, anger and bitterness many felt on their return. “The deportee was filled with hopes glamorizing his return home to friends, some relatives, a place in which to live, a job and the future,” wrote one observer. “These hopes are shattered on arrival.” Unexpected though it might be for us, those returning from Auschwitz were “greeted coldly” by those who had survived the war in Greece itself; they were asked why they, and no others, had made it through the camps alive—the unspoken and sometimes not so unspoken implication being that they had collaborated and allowed the others to go to their death. “The question is almost always asked: why are you alive and not my relative—my mother, my father, sister and so forth,” wrote an aid worker in December 1945. “This led to the untrue generalization on the part of the leading people … that in the main only the worst elements of the Jews survived the concentration camps.”14

  Angered by such charges, many returnees claimed that “they had been better treated in Germany than here,” and accused those who had stayed of hoarding their wealth and failing to help them out. An unemployed former camp inmate threw a stone through the glass window of Haim B.’s shop, and then shouted to the crowd of onlookers that men like the shop’s owner “had taken all the millions of the world while men like these die of hunger.” To the police he declared that he had wanted “to take revenge on all the rich Jews who did not care about the fate of the poor and never set foot in the community except when they need certificates of the death of their relatives or other favours.” For his part the shopkeeper blamed the community authorities for not doing more both to help the needy, and to clamp down on such incidents—of which this was evidently not the first.15

  The 1157 “Poles” formed their own party for the communal elections early in 1946 and thanks to their numbers won the largest share of the vote. Yet in truth, their programme scarcely differed from that of their rivals—the Zionists, and the so-called (mostly left-wing) Resurrectionists. All in practice wanted greater control over the communal assets, a more active welfare programme and pressure on the Greek authorities to give back their property. Even after the “Poles” won, they spent most of their time attacking the foreign Jewish relief agencies for their condescending approach. This aggressiveness was really an outward manifestation of the suspicion, individualism and anxiety that harrowed survivors’ lives. But such attitudes made it frustrating for outsiders to work with them. Relations deteriorated as the new communal authorities tried to insist proudly on their right to handle all funds from abroad; by 1947 the quarrel had got so bad that the main Jewish relief agency actually withdrew from the city. Its subsequent verdict on the way the survivors were handling their affairs was that they were poorly led, lacked any communal solidarity, and allowed party politicking—the old curse—to get in the way of proper organization.16

  RESTITUTION

  NONE OF THIS HELPED in the battle to get Jewish property back. On liberation, the new Greek government had repudiated the wartime legislation passed by its predecessors and thus, in theory at least, committed itself to restoring Jewish properties to their former owners. But in the city itself such a policy collided with the interests of the wartime beneficiaries and their patrons, and it soon became clear that they were not going to give up without a fight.

  At first things went well. For four months the city was run by EAM/ELAS—the left-wing national resistance movement—which was broadly sympathetic to the plight of Salonica’s Jews. Its officials had lists of collaborators who had taken properties, and warned them to hand them back or face charges: several dozen complied. But in the winter of 1944–45 relations in Athens between EAM/ELAS and the British-backed government broke down and the crisis eventually led to the “December events” in which the two sides fought openly in the streets, and RAF planes strafed leftist suburbs. In Salonica an uneasy understanding was preserved but this conflict and the victory for the right that followed entirely altered the balance of power. After February 1945 the once-powerful EAM/ELAS was gradually marginalized, the middle ground in Greek politics disappeared, and
the British-backed government (and its successors) came to rely on anti-communists and former collaborators. In far-off Athens, governments were weak and changed frequently. Despite making all the right noises for international consumption on the issue of Jewish property, they found it hard to combat the increasingly organized opposition to restitution in Salonica itself.

  After March 1945, the hand-over slowed down to a trickle. Under EAM/ELAS, forty to fifty properties had been restored, and others had been reclaimed through various forms of direct action as the old owners simply evicted the new ones, confident that the police would not intervene. But over the following year only another thirty-seven were handed over, and the police started to behave less sympathetically. By spring 1946, there were stories of claimants being assaulted, and of the wartime caretakers appealing to the courts to try to get eviction orders rescinded, demanding “their” shop back. A vegetable merchant who had thrown a Jewish grocer out of his shop across the street in 1943 challenged an eviction order three years later and managed to persuade the court of appeal to find in his favour.17

  One reason why the courts were reluctant to intervene was the severe housing shortage afflicting the city as a whole. At least ten thousand refugee families were still living in the primitive huts they had inhabited since the 1920s and many of the newcomers who had come during the war were worse off still. Cement worker Georgios D., his wife and his six children lived in a large damp hole within the Byzantine walls. The family of Constantine T. inhabited a one-room shack three and a half metres square; another family, refugees from the Bulgarians, lived in an “old half-destroyed wooden hut” with no mattresses, blankets, clothing, plates or utensils—at least according to the relief workers that visited them: for meals they boiled wild herbs. One downtown shop was shared between seven families; another group of eight families, again wartime refugees, camped out in a vacant house near the station. There were hundreds of such stories.18

  The housing shortage also provided an excuse to protect politically well-connected clients; and even when courts did issue restitution orders little was done. YDIP continued to function in 1945 and 1946, under a new director, and remained part of the governor-general’s office: on several occasions the governor-general, a political appointee, instructed it to ignore court instructions to hand properties back. Douros was reassigned to his old job running the city’s mortgage office and publicly protested accusations of collaboration, claiming he had been threatened by the Germans as a “saboteur,” and insisting he had never wanted the job in the first place. Alexandros Krallis, the former president of the Chamber of Commerce, and Simonides were arraigned as collaborators at the end of 1945, but the trial against them was suspended. Wartime YDIP personnel were tried later and mostly acquitted.19

  Legally speaking, too, restitution was not a straightforward matter. It was not just survivors who were claiming their properties; others made claims on the basis of kinship to, or even business associations with, a deceased owner. Children and siblings were usually considered to inherit automatically; but survivors demanded that more distant degrees of consanguinity be accepted as well. Lack of witnesses to the death of most of the Jews meant that lawyers and religious authorities found themselves having to make the macabre adjudication on whether parents and children had been gassed simultaneously or not in order to rule on whether claimants really were justified in presenting themselves as the heirs of the dead. To prove kinship applicants needed special certificates from the town hall, a process which the local authorities began to obstruct to slow down the rate of return. “If the citizen is called Nikolaos, Georgios or Ioannis,” wrote one journalist angrily, “he is freely given the certification of kinship which he needs to inherit the property of his parents or more distant relatives. But if he is called Avraam, Isaac or Iakov, it is not issued. Fine logic!” By the spring of 1949, the mayor’s office had been blocking the issue of such certificates for more than a year.20

  At bottom, the problem was a political one. In the spring of 1945 many of the wartime caretakers were sufficiently worried at being branded collaborators to pass on their properties to third parties; but by the summer, as the political climate changed, they had lost these fears and were already beginning to mobilize in a more overt fashion. In fact, they formed a “Union of Trustees” to put pressure on the governor-general’s office, and built up close ties with the Venizelist Liberal Party in particular; the pre-war link between Salonica’s Liberals and anti-Jewish sentiment had survived the war, and intensified as the party did well in elections locally. In late 1945 a judge decided that since the Jews had “abandoned” their properties during the war, they had no automatic right of return. Then a new governor-general froze all transfers. “We haven’t the strength to control ourselves any longer and keep quiet about this scandal,” wrote one Jewish journalist in 1946. “Our interest is also that of Greece as a whole: the country cannot identify itself with a handful of collaborationist caretakers.”21

  But others disagreed. As elsewhere in Europe, post-war arguments over the restitution of properties intensified anti-Jewish feelings. One public prosecutor in the city exclaimed that “the persecution which the Jews endured at the hands of the Germans has now turned since Liberation into a persecution of Christians by Jews.” A local Liberal politician complained it was “not fair that every Jew should inherit fifteen shops.” The governor-general—and then the Athens government—advised the community to restrict its demands lest it create what they described as a “social problem” in the city. By the summer of 1947 there was a full-scale press campaign in Salonica against Jewish claims. The poverty of the refugees was contrasted with the supposed wealth of the surviving Jews. “To get rid of my boredom and sorrow I bought a newspaper. To my great astonishment I read that I’d become stinking rich,” commented a survivor in a satirical Jewish sketch. “All the Jews have become filthy rich, it said. I am a Jew—what I went through in Hitler’s camps proves it—so I must be filthy rich too.”22

  The contrast in the way Athens and Salonica approached these issues was as apparent after the war as it had been during it. In February 1945 Salonica welcomed Archbishop Damaskinos, the most senior figure in the Greek church, who was then serving as regent of the country. Damaskinos and his counterpart in the city, Gennadios, both made speeches at a ceremony to celebrate liberation. But while Damaskinos included explicit references to the suffering of “our Jewish fellow-citizens,” Gennadios did not mention the deportations at all, even though they had affected his flock far more directly.

  Meanwhile, the municipality’s pursuit of its own interests continued to cause conflict. The inauguration of the new university hospital “on top of Jewish bones” (as one newspaper put it) was boycotted by the Jewish community’s officials. The old cemetery was still being looted for buried treasure and, more alarmingly, despoiled by council workers; carts were carrying away gravestones daily. The mayor promised a Jewish delegation that they would be collected and returned to the community, but eleven months later little had been done. There were further painful negotiations both locally and nationally over the expropriation of the Hirsch hospital, and the rubble-strewn area where the 151 neighbourhood had once stood. In January 1949, a Jewish newspaper published an open letter to the mayor accusing him not merely of a “lack of interest” but actual discrimination against Jewish claims.23

  Weakness forced Salonica’s Jews to seek support outside the city, and the newly formed Athens-based Central Jewish Council (KIS) lobbied ministers on its behalf and liaised with American Jewish organizations and U.S. government officials. But KIS’s very creation—and location—was a reminder of how far the fortunes of Salonican Jewry had fallen. Before the war, the city had housed two-thirds of the country’s total Jewish population and had been the centre of its intellectual and cultural life; after 1945, however, only one-fifth of the approximately eleven thousand Greek Jews who had survived the war lived there and the spotlight shifted to the nation’s capital. The Salonicans w
ere suspicious of the Jews in Athens, claiming they were less educated and politically inexperienced: they had formed KIS to protect their own interests, they were slow to worry about the plight of their fellow-Jews in Salonica, and they were led by Zionists, who would compromise with the Greek government on the property issue in order to facilitate emigration to Palestine. There may have been some truth on all counts; far more important was that KIS itself, like the Salonican community, was racked by political infighting.24

  In the end, after several years of hard bargaining and thanks to behind-the-scenes American intervention, an agreement was reached with the Greek government by which a new, Jewish-run successor to YDIP would administer the large amount of property left unclaimed after the war. Greece had been quick to recognize the need for restitution in principle, noted one Salonica journalist, but slow to implement it in practice. YDIP was wound up in 1949, and the new organization started to negotiate directly with the caretakers and the municipal government. By 1953 it had regained control of 543 homes, 51 shops, 67 plots of land and 18 huts.25

  The political repercussions of the wartime property free-for-all had not, however, been laid entirely to rest and the quick rehabilitation of collaborators in the conservative climate of post-war Greece created many hostages to fortune. In 1957 Max Merten, the wartime military administrator of the city, visited Greece to testify at the trial of his former interpreter. To the shock of the West German embassy—which had assured him he would be safe—and the Greek government itself, which was taken entirely by surprise, a zealous public prosecutor in Athens had him arrested and charged with war crimes. On trial for his activities in Salonica, as one survivor after another recounted the events of 1943, Merten made the explosive allegation that among his wartime contacts had been members of the current Greek government, and other individuals very close to the prime minister, Konstantine Karamanlis. The timing could not have been worse, for Greece was in the middle of negotiations to enter the Common Market. Karamanlis could not prevent the trial from going ahead, but he quietly agreed with the Germans that, in return for Bonn’s backing of his country’s membership application, Merten would be transferred to the Federal Republic as soon as the trial was over. The sordid bargain was struck, and after a perfunctory second trial there, Merten was released.